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The Short Story and the Photographic: Twentieth-Century Imagetexts in and of the Americas

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The Short Story and the Photographic: Twentieth-Century Imagetexts in and of the Americas City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2017 The Short Story and the Photographic: Twentieth-Century Imagetexts In and Of the Americas Lucienne Muller The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1811 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] THE SHORT STORY AND THE PHOTOGRAPHIC: TWENTIETH-CENTURY IMAGETEXTS IN AND OF THE AMERICAS by LUCIENNE MULLER A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2017 ©2017 Lucienne Muller All rights Reserved ii The Short Story and the Photographic: Twentieth Century Imagetexts in and of the Americas by Lucienne Muller This Manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. _________________________ ________________________________ Date Dr. Mary Ann Caws Chair of Examining Committee _________________________ _________________________________ Date EO Dr. Giancarlo Lombardi Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Dr. Mary Ann Caws Dr. Bettina Lerner THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT The Short Story and the Photographic: Twentieth Century Imagetexts in and of the Americas by Lucienne Muller Advisor: Dr. Mary Ann Caws The visuality of the short story has been primarily studied by comparing the short story to painting and to lyrical poetry. This dissertation departs from that tradition by examining the visuality of the short story from an intermedial point of view, that is, with a focus on the relationship between the short story and the photographic visual. The works studied are called imagetexts, hybrid works wherein verbal texts and photographic images coexist variously in an equal relationship. I explore a variety of connections between the short story and the photographic when they are conjoined in the following ways: where the visual image and the verbal text are published together, where image and text are equal components in the telling of a story, where the short story is the source of a film adaptation and where short stories and photographs are deliberately paired to further inquire into the ways in which photography renews short fiction. This intermedial analysis of the short story and the photographic draws from photographic theory and from the writings of photographer and writer Julio Cortázar whose philosophy puts forward the idea of a reader who becomes the inventive co-creator of the fictional work. Hence, while this dissertation sheds new light on the visuality of the short story, it iv simultaneously discovers the critical and creative potential of the conjoining of the short story and the photographic that is made visible in the active viewing and creative reading that results from an intermedial analysis of specific twentieth century short story imagetexts. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank the late Walter ‘Tio’ Maguire for his unwavering support throughout the work on this project and especially for his dedication and guidance during the photography projects on the Delmarva Peninsula that generated this dissertation topic. My memories of the late Andre E. Muller, especially his unconditional love and interest in my writing, have sustained me throughout. Among the many members of my family and friends without whose support I would not have completed the dissertation, I thank, in particular, Dalia Muller for her love, enthusiasm for the project, and intellectual advice, Camilo Trumper for his love, conversations about photography and critical suggestions, Paty Tomic, Ricardo Trumper, Ana Jimena Portilla, Isabel Portilla Flores, Juan Pablo Rulfo, Christine Barras, Enrique Lanz, Patrick Reilly, Peter Skutches, Rob Sauté and Carole Soskin for their moral and intellectual support throughout this long journey. Last but not least, I thank Jordan Geiger for his expertise in computer technology and visual imagery and Nino Imnaishvili for her invaluable technical support. I thank my advisor Dr. Mary Ann Caws for agreeing to this project and for her patience and careful reading of my chapters, her important insights, stimulating comments, and for the inspiration that her writing and translations have given me. On my desk is a photograph of my five year old granddaughter, Amaya, sitting at her desk, drawing and learning to write. Whenever I thought I might not continue, this photograph gave me the motivation to keep writing. I owe the joy that fills my heart and keeps me alive to my grandchildren, Amaya Elena and Simón Santiago Emilio. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..1 2. Chapter One. A Photographic Frontispiece and Five Short Stories………………….9 Alvin Langdon Coburn and Henry James 3. Chapter Two. Short Stories Composed with Words and Pictures……………..……65 Roy DeCarava, Langston Hughes, and Donald Barthelme 4. Chapter Three. Film Adaptations of Short Stories…………………………………137 Jean Epstein’s La chute de la maison Usher, Robert Siodmak’s Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up 5. Chapter Four. Two Short Story Writer-Photographers………………………….….209 Juan Rulfo and Eudora Welty 6. Epilogue…………………………………………………………………………….291 7. Illustrations………………………………………………………………………….296 8. Works Cited………………………………………………………………………....324 vii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 1.0 Saltram’s Seat Fig. 1.1 Signature and portrait of Henry James Fig. 2.0 Cover of The Sweet Flypaper of Life Fig. 2.1 Woman walking and fire hydrant scene Fig. 2.2 Women and subway platforms Fig. 2.3 Elderly couple and daughter Melinda Fig. 2.4 Another daughter laughing/mother-in-law/musician Fig. 2.5 “The Educational Experience” with and without pictures Fig. 2.6 “At the Tolstoy Museum” Fig. 2.7 Boys reading: Gordon Parks and Roy de Carava imagetexts Fig. 2.8 Boy reading and Rodney in basement room Fig. 2.9 Melinda with infant and Melinda reading Fig. 2.10 “The Photographs” Fig. 2.11 “A Nation of Wheels” Fig. 2.12 A Harlem Street and an image of Rodney Fig. 2.13 Rodney’s parents, a girlfriend, a basement, and a man near a jukebox Fig 2.14 “Eugenie Grandet:” pages from The New Yorker and Sixty Stories Fig. 2.15 “Brain Damage:” a graphic imagetext Fig. 4.0 Cortázar: photographs from the pages of “Del cuento breve” viii Fig. 4.1 “Vecindades de la colonia Guerrero” Fig. 4.2 “Sister and brother/Jackson/1930s” Fig. 4.3 “Casa en llamas” Fig. 4.4 “Back Street/New Orleans/1930s” Fig. 4.5 “Anciana de Apan, Hidalgo” and “Banda tirada en un campo verde” Fig. 4.6 “Ruins of Windsor/Port Gibson/1942” Fig. 4.6.1 “Home after high water/Rodney” Fig. 4.7 “Hypnotist, State Fair/ Jackson.” ix INTRODUCTION In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction.” Poe, “Review of Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales” 1842. …the photographer or the story writer finds himself obliged to choose and delimit an image or an event which must be meaningful, which is meaningful not only in itself, but rather is capable of acting on the viewer or reader as a kind of opening... Cortázar, “Some Aspects of the Short Story” 1962. Given the ubiquity of the photograph and the short story in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the cultural influence of film--a technology based on the photograph--it is not surprising that Argentine writer and photographer Julio Cortázar depicted the short story as a photograph in his essay “Some Aspects of the Short Story.” But the meaningful connection between these two aesthetic forms was established much earlier by Edgar Allan Poe. It is commonplace among literary historians and critics to consider Edgar Allan Poe the founder of the modern short story and it is often said that Poe became canonized as the founder of the genre, posthumously, in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In an 1885 essay entitled “The Philosophy of the Short-story,” Brander Matthews coined the term ‘Short-story’ in order to distinguish this new genre from its antecedent, the tale. Matthews featured Poe’s work, 1 especially his “Review of Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales” in order to emphasize the formal qualities of the short story. Thereafter, Poe’s writings became the founding documents of the genre in the Americas and, to the present day, the force of the visual effects of his stories inspires countless adaptations in film and other visual media. Poe’s stories, like those of other short story writers, first appeared in magazines during the 1840s. Indeed, the context in which Poe wrote tales and criticism is one where magazines, literary, commercial or both, flourished. Critics who analyze short stories published in mid- nineteenth century American magazines, find that Poe’s choice to be a magazinist greatly influenced his ideas about the form. In the nineteenth century and, to a lesser degree in the twentieth century, short stories in American magazines were illustrated. Even when pictures were not intended to be story illustrations, the stories appeared surrounded by pictures. The phenomenal increase in images, especially photographic images, in the nineteenth century made it impossible, as Nancy Armstrong argues in her book, Fiction in the Age of Photography, for people to avoid confronting unprecedented quantities of images containing information about the world and its inhabitants.
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